Memories of childhood snow days

I must have seen it in a movie, one of the old black and white ones: jovial carolers coming into the manor, brushing the snow off their shoulders and stamping their feet. Or rosy-cheeked sledders whacking their boots against the doorstep as the fluffy stuff obligingly disperses.

That’s not the way it works in north Georgia, where I remember about four or five childhood snows. Soggy, 35-degree snows. Snows that bring down pine trees onto every powerline in ten counties. Snows that nevertheless thrill the hearts of schoolchildren, who almost instantly find that they’re not equipped for their Alpine fantasies. That was not mitten country, or sweater country, or even often warm hat country. Even our coats and jackets in those pre-synthetics days were fairly unimpressive, unless a Yankee cousin had sent along a bulky wool one.

All these impediments were as nothing to the footwear problem: no boots.

The farm kids had work boots, I’m sure, but at our house we just had shoes — church ones and school ones, sturdy enough but slippery on the bottom and neither warm nor waterproof.

But snow was snow, so we swapped shoes down the line a bit: with three pairs of socks you could wear the next-oldest one’s oxfords. The same principle went into layering ever bigger shirts and windbreakers underneath jackets. It was hard on the actual biggest kid, of course — though I lucked into a shrunk-in-the-wash gray wool West Point cadet shirt from before the war, I was stuck with my current footwear and one pair of socks.

Still, we zipped the baby into the only snowsuit (from another northern cousin, on its seventh baby) and trooped out, snowballs first on the agenda. We compressed a few drippy ones with our sock-insulated hands and tried to calculate whether there was enough to make a snow-elf. Most years there were disappointing efforts that involved very dirty leafy agglomerations of slush; this time the snow was deep enough that the next-youngest had already stepped in up over her ankles, which augured well. Somebody went around to the coal hole for eyes and we used acorns for nostrils as we’d forgotten a carrot.

The one who’d stepped in to what we were calling “the drift” had thoroughly wet cold feet already. The rest of us had stripped off our dripping sock-gloves and proceeded bare-handed, scraping snow off benches and the front of the car and chucking it at each other half-heartedly, checking from time to time to see whose hands were bluest. Half-melted snow accumulated on our sleeves and pants cuffs and refroze into unbeautiful, uncinematic blobs that wouldn’t let go no matter how much we stamped our numb, stinging feet at the front door. Nobody started a carol, but we got inside before anyone wept.

We’d been outside twelve minutes.

When I moved to Boston in my twenties, I went out and bought a pair of L.L. Bean duck boots before the leaves even began to turn.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2025 World edition.